It is common for computers to communicate securely. A computer may have a provable identity that another computer can evaluate to determine that the first computer is the computer that it purports to be (e.g. a particular company's login and authorization server).
It is also common for companies or other entities to deploy server farms made up of virtual machines (VMs). In such server farms, multiple VMs may be configured homogenously and serve resources to clients—such as remote desktops or remote applications. In the course of managing such a server farm, VMs may be destroyed and (re)created. A VM may be destroyed and then recreated for a variety of reasons, such as to prevent drift from a known machine state by recreating it with a known machine state.
In these deployments where VMs are destroyed and created, each VM may have a provable identity. There are many problems with establishing a provable identity for a VM of a deployment, some of which are well known.